The Wheel In the Sky
by MrPointy2
Summary: Dawn's presence in the world has far reaching effects even out to a ring shaped object hundreds of light years away.
1. Chapter 1

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

It was two o'clock in the morning in Sunnydale. Buffy and Willow crouched behind a dumpster in an alley in the crapist part of town. For two days they had been looking for Dawn who somehow managed to get herself captured yet again by the forces of darkness. Buffy was desperate and running out of ideas. She had managed to beg Willow into performing a locator spell.

"Not real happy about the magics." Willow had said to her as she succumbed to Buffy pleading. "I can do a simple locator spell. All I need is a drop of blood."

"Thanks Wil. You're the best." Buffy said relived.

Willow pricked Buffy's finger and set the blood amid the rune stones.

"I need something that belongs to Dawn and since you and she have the same blood…"

The drop of blood began to glow a soft white color tinged by orange streaks.

""This is called a bloodline." Willow said. "The magic creates an actual physical line in the air that we can follow. This is better than GPS." Willow smiled.

Buffy's blood sparked. A thin red line rose up from the center of the rune stones. It snaked like a living thing. The blood line hesitated then split in two. One half of the blood line curved around the corner pointing to a rundown warehouse. Buffy's suspicions were confirmed.

Willow did not look too happy. The other half of the bloodline shot upwards disappearing into a star crowded region of the sky.

"Is it suppose to do that?" Buffy asked not really caring. Willows use of magic was not the most precise. Any number of things could have gone wrong.

"Uh, Buffy.." Willow said with real concern in her voice. "According to this, Dawn is also in the general direction of the galactic center."

Buffy looked up following the path of the bloodline as it disappeared into the sky.

"Well, let's check this planet first, ok?" Buffy said.

"Right with you." Willow replied. Buffy pulled out her stake as they headed towards the warehouse.

The next day in the magic shop Willow performed the spell again. She realized she was a novice but the results she got last night were insane. How could she mess up such a simple spell? The rune stone she used last night still had Buffy's blood on it. Willow sat in the upstairs section of the Magic shop where she could have a clear view of Dawn and Buffy as she performed the spell again. Sure enough, the bloodline split. One half of it went directly to Dawn. The other half pointed downwards this time.

"Well, this is new." Willow thought. For nearly an hour she watched the downward pointing bloodline slowly shift a few degrees as if it was tracking a moving source.

"Of course!" Willow thought. "If it's tracking an object in space it's going to shift as the Earth rotates."

"Hey, Willow!" Buffy yelled from below. "We're going to the bronze. Wanna hang?"

"In research mode." She answered. "I've got to troubleshoot this spell."

"Have fun." Buffy replied sarcastically. Buffy, Dawn and Xander left the magic shop.

Willow watched the shifting bloodline. A thought occurred to her. Whatever it was tracking would be over the horizon in a few hours. She grabbed her laptop and punched up some "Sky and Telescope" star maps. She was glad she had talked Giles into installing a wireless hotspot. She located a GPS unit behind the counter and got her precise latitude and longitude.

"I can't wait." Willow thought impatiently to herself. "If I measure the rate of angular displacement I can predict when whatever this bloodline is tracking will appear above the horizon. Willow did the math. Sure enough the object was on the celestial equator.

The celestial equator is a great circle on an imaginary sphere in the same plane as the Earths equator. It is a projection of the terrestrial equator out into space. As the Earth rotated everything in the sky moved at the same speed.

Willow brought up pictures from the newly repaired Hubble telescope to see what it was that the bloodline was tracking. She reviewed the images on her laptop. Nothing special stood out. Then she got an idea. Willow connected directly to the images database on the NASA computers after a few minutes of careful hacking. She came across the typical series of encrypted classified photographs. None of them held her interest. However, she located a new series of jpegs with a ".mil' tag.

".mil" is the internet domain for the military.

"Come to me my sweeties." Willow carefully hacked the jpegs in a few seconds. She didn't want a repeat of last time.

What popped up on her screen was a high definition image of a blurry G2 star with a ring around it. Willow enhanced the image. The jpeg was generated by the Hubble telescope. The picture size was well over five thousand pixels. Willow examined the ring around the star and squeaked.

She was fairly certain the ring was solid.


	2. Chapter 2

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Buffy threw her books to the floor and dove onto the bed in her smallish dorm room. She had returned to her room right after receiving her midterm test results. The results were terrible. She was basically failing most of her classes. It was unfair. She had saved the world several times over now she this close to flunking out of school.

"Why can't I get extra points for slaying?" She thought then smiled. "That would be cool."

After a moment she said to herself "Maybe the double meat palace has a management program." She wiped the tears from her face as she turned over on her back.

"What's wrong with me? I studied for days. I guess I'm just stupid." Buffy beat herself up. Then a thought occurred to her. She leapt off the bed and began searching through the magic books Willow kept in the room.

"There's got to be something here that can make me smarter." After thirty minutes of searching Buffy found what she was looking for.

The next day

The mystery of the bloodline had Willow stumped. She didn't like that. She came to the magic shop to think and to do research. That was now impossible. Somehow she had gotten talked into helping out behind the counter.

Buffy walked into the Magic Shop looking dejected. She took one of the magic books off of the shelf and began to go over it.

"You ever thought in a million years you would miss the school library?" Xander asked her.

"Someone put a spell on my Mom. Something to make her look like she's sick." Buffy replied.

"That's a new kind of nasty. Any suspects?

"Got the list narrowed down to just under infinity. "

Anya and Willow were arguing about something at the counter. Willow held up a badly wrapped package.

"Does this look right to you?" She asked Anya.

"Sure, if you wrapped it with your feet. " Anya replied smartly. "You know Buffy there used to be this French sorcerer back in sixteen-I-don't-know-what's named…"

"Cloutier?" Giles injected.

"So cute in his little knickers but he had this one spell demons just hated called "Tirer la Couture." Anya said.

Buffy attempted to translate. "Rotate many foodstuffs?"

"Pull the curtain back" Willow corrected.

"A spell to see spells. Well, a trance to see spells, but, you get the idea. Try that". Anya went back to wrapping the package correctly.

Willow got an idea. Something had fudged the bloodline spell she performed on Buffy the other night. This "Tirer la Couture" sounded like the perfect thing to find out what was going on.

That night Willow entered the trance and found her way over to the Summers home. She felt like a stalker as she peeked through the living room window. Buffy had obviously gone home and performed the trance herself. She was having some sort of argument with Dawn. That wasn't what she came for.

Sure enough, she could see that Buffy was under a spell, actually multiple spells. Buffy was a slayer so she was under the slayer spell all the time. Willow could see that as a constant blue glow. But there was a second spell at work that grew stronger the further away she was from Dawn. Willow watched Buffy for several minutes. The other spell would actually grow stronger the further away Dawn was.

"The key is energy… We had to make sure the slayer would protect it with her life." A voice came out of nowhere and spoke to Willow.

"Dawn?" Willow puzzled to herself. Willow watched. Every time Dawn walked away from Buffy the glow from the second spell grew stronger.

Willow put the pieces together. "Buffy's under a mystical compulsion to protect Dawn!" she thought.

This didn't help her solve the mystery of the bloodline. Willow trudged her way back home.

Willow watched the stars on her laptop. The ringed star was nearly two hundred and fifty light years from Earth. That meant she was seeing light that was at least two hundred and fifty years old. Why had the bloodline spell gone wrong now? She had performed the spell many times in the past with no strange effect. What had changed?

Her eye caught something funny in the way the nearby stars looked in the jpeg. Their spectrum was warped as if something huge and powerful was warping space nearby.

"A wormhole?" She thought. "Wait a minute. Wormholes warp space and time." Then it hit her. She was not looking into the past. Thanks to the distortion of space-time caused by the wormhole, she was looking into the future.


	3. Chapter 3

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The spell kicked in the next day.

While Buffy was taking her makeup exam in ancient history she had a breakthrough. The test question was "Discuss the war strategies used to expand the Assyrian state during the first millennia." At first, she just stared at the paper hoping something would pop into her head. It had never worked before but she kept hope alive. Buffy chewed on her pen and day dreamed as her brain worked on the problem. It took her brain five seconds to recall and organize the information that had laid dormant in her synapses.

"Of course, king Ashurnasirpal II use of inland raids to provide supplies allowed for extended warfare and the expansion of Assyrian forces. That much is obvious. " Buffy smiled to herself. The test became easy almost elementary. Her next makeup test was introduction to calculus. She was well on her way to solving the "Twin Prime Conjecture" and solving one of the oldest unresolved problems in mathematics when the bell rung. She hoped the teacher would give her extra credit.

Willow watched Buffy enter the Magic shop.

She could tell Buffy was happy. She watched Buffy skip her way into the store. Buffy put her books down on the counter and began describing to Giles her success on her makeup exams. Her hands were animated and she did a little dance around the counter. Buffy looked up at Willow with a toothy million dollar smile. Willow could feel her joy from where she sat in the stacks.

"Glad somebody's having a good day." Willow thought to herself. She went back to studying the image on the screen. The ring itself was almost a million miles wide with a surface area of three million Earths. It was spinning with a surface gravity of about one gee. Willow switched to the infrared view. The ring had a regular checkerboard pattern of hot and cold areas almost like a day-night cycle. Someone engineered this thing to be livable. It was not that hard to do the math. There could be trillions of people living there. Trillions!

"What'cha looking at Wil?" Buffy asked. She had sneaked up on her. "Porn? Are you looking at filthy lesbian porn? Not that there's anything wrong with that." Buffy took a peak at the laptop screen.

She saw the ringed star and her breath went out of her. She instantly knew it was an artificial world.

"What the…" Buffy said under her breath. "Wil, can you enhance the area around the star's corona, let's say a million miles out."

Willow tapped the keyboard. Military grade image processing software instantly brought the image of the star into sharp focus. Buffy saw the thin black line that cut across the face of the star.

"Shadow squares." Buffy said. "To recreate the feel of night and day." A terrible idea was forming in her head. 'Wil, where did this come from?"

"Remember the locator spell I did a few days ago? Remember how it split into two sections and one of the sections went towards the sky? I think this is what it was pointing towards."

"It's massive." Buffy said in awe.

"It's mass is equal to the planet Jupiter." Willow added. She looked at Buffy for a moment. "How did you know there would be shadow squares?" she asked.

"Seemed obvious. Once I realized it was built to be inhabited. Because, you know, the ring's distance from the star places it in the green zone, that zone around a star where water can remain in a liquid state. That being the case the diurnal cycle works out to be similar to Earth's." Buffy said without hesitation and somewhat casually.

Willow was staring at her open mouthed.

"When did you become so smart?" Willow asked. She remembered the magic books she had left in their dorm room.

Buff ignored Willow. Her mind was working furiously.

"Willow, tell me about the locator spell you used. The one that went all wonky."

"It was a standard locator spell." Willow responded.

"How do locator spells work?" Buffy asked with urgency in her voice. In the back of her mind, she already had an answer that disturbed her deeply.

"Remember I said I needed something that belonged to Dawn in order for it to work? The spell is basically pattern matching. It takes an object then finds another object that has a connection to it." Willow was trying to understand where Buffy was going with this.

"You used my blood, right?" Buffy asked.

"Right." Willow agreed.

Buffy thought hard for a moment. The monk had told her that Dawn was made from her, that essentially Dawn was a mystic clone of her. The bloodline had split.

"I know what happened." Buffy said with trembling in her voice. This ringworld, it is full of Dawns children, her descendents. There must be hundreds of billions of them there."

"That's not the worst part." Buffy said staring into the Ringworld image. "I've done the math in my head just now. The ringworld is unstable."


	4. Chapter 4

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

She decided to tell them about Dawn.

Buffy had already informed Giles of what she found out about Dawn from the monk who died in her arms. Now with this new information about the ringworld she had to tell everyone about the true nature of Dawn and about the real reason Glory was here. She wondered how they would take the news that Dawn was the mother of billions. It became even more important that Dawn be protected now. More than one world depended on her living a long and fertile life.

In the back of Buffy's mind those billions of lives called out to her. She felt as if she was under a compulsion to leave Sunnydale and fly out to them which was ridiculous. How could she care about people she had never met. It was then that she thought about the endless commercials on television showing starving dark skinned people in Africa. She had never cared about them past the sense that their suffering was an inconvenient intrusion into her happy world view.

"Why do I care about people I've never met?" She thought to herself. She had the answer before she knew it. "It's because I feel connected to them."

"Buffy?" It was Xander. "You called this meeting."

Buffy looked around. Everyone was there and they were staring at her.

"A few days ago I went back and investigated the warehouse where I found the sphere." She said.

"Yes, I remember." said Giles.

"That's when I met Glory for the first time. Let's just say I barely got out alive." Buffy paused for everyone to perform their typical show of concern then she went on. I met someone there, a monk who claimed that Dawn was an artifact. That she was actually a green ball of energy that was molded into the form of a young girl. They gave her to me to protect."

"Yeah, Buffy but I remember that time Dawn and I…" Xander was about to say.

"False memories." Buffy said abruptly. "The monks altered local reality

"What about all the times I baby sitted?" Willow asked.

"You have never baby sitted for Dawn in your life. Dawn has been in this world for less than a month." Buffy's tone was sharp. "The monks changed all of our memories. It's obvious really."

Willow had never known Buffy to be condescending. Just how smart had Buffy become?

"Now there's this other thing." Buffy looked over at Willow for support. She was about to tell everyone about the ringworld and Dawn's billions of descendants.

"The other night Willow performed a locator spell to find Dawn. I spell indicated that somehow she was in deep space in the general direction of the galactic core." Buffy waved everyone to silence. "Hubble images from that region of space showed a G2 star surrounded by a solid ring of matter. The sunward side of the ring is terraformed. That ring could easily hold fifteen trillion people." Buffy could feel the sheer weight of that number. She now had the intelligence to understand and that made her anxious.

"Why now? Giles asked. "Willow's performed locator spells before but they have never indicated anything skyward?"

"We think it's the wormhole." Buffy answered.

"So now there's a wormhole?" Xander muttered.

Buffy smiled over at him.

"The monks didn't think it through." She said. "They didn't appreciate or care about the future effects of shoe horning Dawn into this reality. And now thanks to a cute little warp in space-time the future is now."

"Other than being cool, what possible effect of knowing about the ringworld would have on anyone here?" Xander was curious.

"I can feel them in my heart." Buffy said with sadness. "The monks gave me a fierce compulsion to protect Dawn and that was ok as long as there was just Dawn." Buffy paused a moment to choose her next words. "Now that I know about the others, about her descendants, the compulsion is stronger, much, much, much stronger."

Buffy looked at them with tears in her eyes. "I don't think I can stay on Earth much longer. I'm going to take Dawn and move to the ringworld."

The Scooby gang was in stunned silence.


	5. Chapter 5

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The Field Test

They were all over her in the magic shop. After she made her announcement that she wanted to leave the Earth and take Dawn to the ringworld the Scoobies had erupted with howls of protest. Giles reminded her of her sacred duty to protect mankind and the ongoing threats from the hellmouth.

She didn't give a damn about the world. Her blood was screaming for the ringworld. She could feel the pull of the billions of lives it was now her duty to protect. The well being of Dawn and these strangers were now her top priority which made no sense to her because of one simple fact.

The ringworld was unstable.

The ringworld spun at seven hundred and seventy miles per second creating the feel of gravity by the centrifugal force. This made the ringworld very stable along its axis but highly unstable in the plane. A strong solar flare could push it off course. Buffy had viewed a series of sequential images of the ring world. Its shift was minute, but she could tell it had less than a year until it brushed its sun killing trillions.

Buffy had fled from the magic shop to get away from them. She was upset and the only thing that could calm her down was the presence of Dawn. She was making her way home as quickly as possible. Her mind reviewed what the monks had done. Dawn had been in the world less than a month. She appeared right after Buffy had met the legendary count Dracula. Dracula had tasted her, had sampled her blood. Buffy couldn't believe she didn't get the connection until now.

The monks had used Dracula to get a sample of her blood in order to create Dawn! The monk's accent was eastern European. Wasn't that awfully close to Transylvania?

"I was blind but now I see." Buffy said to herself as she waited for the light to change at the intersection. "Everything the monks did is obvious to me now. It's a miracle I haven't died more often." Her cell phone was ringing constantly. She did not want to answer it. The light changed and she crossed the street.

"If mom was here…" Buffy's thoughts trailed off. Her mind leapt lighting quick to an awful conclusion that just seemed obvious now that she had her enhanced intelligence. Joyce had often told her that the memories that a mother carries of her child are not just stored in the head. The memories are stored in every cell of her body. But Joyce was not Dawn's mother. Dawn has no biological mother. When the monks changed the world their magics had to make Joyce conform to the lie she had carried and given birth to Dawn. Something in Joyce fought back against the lie and was killed for trying to cling to the truth. Instead of giving birth to Dawn, she had conceived a tumor that killed her.

"They killed my mother to make the world conform to a lie." The revelation stunned Buffy and stopped her dead in her tracks. 'They killed my mother!"

When she entered the house her eyes were red and puffy from crying. She saw Spike sitting in the chair across from the couch, across from Dawn. Buffy dropped her purse and leapt across the room. She slammed into him knocking him off the chair. She rammed the meaty part of her palm into his nose breaking it. She was trying to send bone fragments into his brain to kill him. She wasn't thinking clearly. She was running on pure rage. Spike rolled her over to the side and scrambled to his feet. His eyes were wide in surprise but his instincts were true. He managed to land several punches on Buffy without the slightest hint of a headache. Buffy recovered and managed to catch him in the throat with her elbow. Spike staggered backwards. Buffy grabbed an iron poker from the fireplace and rammed it through his chest. Spike fell backwards. Buffy grabbed her battle axe from her war chest near the back of the toppled chair and approached Spike. She was going to cut his head off.

Dawn stepped between them.

"BUFFY!" She screamed. "What the HELL are you doing?!"

Buffy stopped. She still had the axe in her hand. Her breathing was deep and heavy. Her eyes were glassy and defocused. Buffy looked at Dawn. Dawn did not recognize the furious thing staring back at her from behind Buffy's eyes.

"Spike, get to the basement, now!" Dawn said. She didn't take her eyes off of Buffy. Spike wasn't moving. The tension was still thick in the air. "The basement now!" she said again with an edge in her voice. "Or I can let Buffy buy you a ticket to dust city."

Spike scrambled to his feet. He pulled the iron poker out of his chest with a grunt. He dropped it to the floor as he made his way to the basement. Dawn watched him go then turned to Buffy.

"Have you gone mad?" The anger was evident in her voice.

Buffy remembered how to talk. She spoke in a low emotionless voice that forced Dawn to take a step back.

"Vampires are evil monsters. They are a threat to you." Buffy tilted her head and stared at Dawn with intense and empty eyes. "I must keep you safe." She said.

In the basement Spike was confused. Buffy had tried to kill him! She was serious. Spike rubbed his chest where she had skewed him with the poker. He was healing but it still hurt. Buffy had tried to kill him, for real this time. That thought echoed around in his head. But that's not what he was confused about. He had hit Buffy several times and felt no pain. Either the chip in his head had stopped working or Buffy wasn't Human anymore. Spike smiled and considered his options.


	6. Chapter 6

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

"Go over it again Willow." Giles asked. He was still in the magic shop franticly trying to reach Buffy on her cell phone. So far there was no answer. "Tell me what's happened."

Willow blew air through her lips while she organized her thoughts.

"First the monks create Dawn from Buffy using her blood. To make Dawn fit they changed reality to give Dawn a background cover. They even went so far as to change memories so that we wouldn't question Dawns existence." Willow said giving a general outline. "And to make sure Buffy would protect her, the monks gave Buffy a mystical compulsion to protect Dawn."

"I understand so far." Giles said as he dialed Buffy's cell phone number again.

"This is where things start to go wrong. The monks bonded Buffy to the biology of the construct. Buffy is bonded to the blood not the person. They were rushed. They never had time to review "Elements of Logic" or such. It never occurred to the monks that Dawn would live long enough to reproduce.

"So let's say we get out of this, we live and Glory is gone. Apparently the monks never came back and uncreated Dawn, never put reality back the way it was. Dawn grows up, has kids, those kids have kids and those kids have kids until at some point in the future billions of them are occupying the ringworld. Normally it wouldn't matter. The protector spell on Buffy would have never been affected by those descendants if the wormhole had not created a short cut in both space and time alerting the protector spell that billions of little Dawns exist out there. The sad fact is that most monks never really study advanced physics. Sure, they sign up for the classes but most of them drop out during the first few weeks."

Willow was trying to be funny.

Giles pocked his cell phone. Buffy had not answered.

"I'm sure Xander will catch up with her soon." Giles said. "Does Xander have a cell phone?"

"Yes." Willow said as she held it up for him to see. Giles rolled his eyes. Willow continued.

The problem is not that Dawn exists. The problem is that Dawn persists. She affects the universe in ways the monks never considered. As far as the ringworld goes, here's an allegory. The ringworld is to Buffy as a full moon is to a werewolf. As long as the mystical compulsion in Buffy is aware of Dawn's descendants through the wormhole she will feel the pull to protect them. As soon as the wormhole drifts out of position things will return to normal. Buffy can go back to obsessing only about Dawn."

Willow thought about the cute purple umbrella they had given to Buffy with the plaque that read "Class Protector." Buffy was way past that now.

"Any idea of when the wormhole will drift out of position cutting the protector spell's connection to the ringworld?" Giles asked.

"Not a clue.' Willow said. "The wormhole is relatively close to the ringworld and the ringworld is hundreds of light years away. That's one stable wormhole. I need to research more to determine how long it will take the solar system to drift out of the cone of its influence."

"In any case, Buffy's not leaving the Earth. What is she going to do? Hijack a spaceship?" Giles said.

"Or build one." Willow mumbled.

"What?" Giles couldn't believe what he had just heard.

"Didn't I tell you? Buffy's a genius now."


	7. Chapter 7

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Buffy turned off the gravity generator. The hum of staggering energies began to fade from the particle accelerators that covered thousands of square miles of the ringworld surface. Beneath her was the forces needed to create and vibrate a quantum singularity and twist it into wormhole. The hard part was getting it to rejoin space-time at the right point in the past. All she had was her memories to guide her and hundreds of years of personal experience.

Her keep was under the Map of Mars. It had been long abandoned by the intruders Louis Wu and the Kzin Chmeee. She had no idea where the Hindmost was currently. After the Fringe war, after the battles for the ringworld throne she waited for the Humans of Known Space to abandon their search for the ringworld and then she conquered the ringworld and build a device to communicate with the past for reasons that were so compelling that after hundreds of years she still could not think of an alternative plan.

Buffy watched them on the high definition monitor. She spied on the activities of millions of Dawns descendants from cameras mounted from the spill walls and elsewhere. The stupid monks never came back and uncreated Dawn. So here she was, five hundred years later, the oldest human in the universe, driven by a mystical compulsion to protect her blood. Buffy never once felt sorry for herself.

She was not like the Pak Protectors. They were only driven by a biological need to protect their own. They were xenophobic and dangerous. Buffy killed them all with a bottle of perfume. Of course, the perfume was crafted to mimic the pheromones of each particular protector's clan. In a fair fight, Pak Protectors are no match for Slayers. She regretted killing any natural being. But she had to do it. They could have gotten in her way.

She was the first person they had seen with gray hair. She said her name was "grandma" as more of a joke than anything else. The name stuck. The descendants that knew her called her that. She had waited fifteen years after she arrived on Ringworld before taking the tree of life. Six months after emerging from her coma Buffy came across her first vampire of supernatural origin on the ringworld. She killed it. She was still a Slayer and now also a Protector against threats both secular and divine.

Buffy brought up the smaller picture-in-picture video. It expanded to fill the huge three hundred inch monitor in front of her. The display showed the light from the braking drives of hundreds of general products ships. The Puppeteer assault fleet had finally arrived.

"Time to go to work." The Buffy Protector said.

Xander entered the summer's home. He gingerly stepped over the broken furniture. His eyes landed on Buffy and Dawn. It looked like they were having a heated discussion, a heated discussion with battle axes.

"Buffy I hate to axe this but have you eaten your crazy flakes today?" Xander said as he made his way into the living room. The main chair was turned over and there were signs of a struggle. The fireplace poker had blood on it.

"Was glory here?" Xander asked. His voice was full of concern.

Buffy looked at him. She looked preoccupied as if she was making plans.

"Glory has to be handled but she's not the main threat.' Buffy said. She sat the axe on the sofa and got her purse. Buffy pulled out her one and only credit card. She still had a few hundred dollars of available credit on it.

"Xander, I need you to pick up some items from the hardware store. I'll make a list." Buffy wrote down a list of items and handed it to Xander.

Xander read over the list.

"An AC relay, receiver actuator, pressure regulator, air mass relief valve, 3 way valve, quick release fitting for an air line, solenoid, vacuum pump. What are you building? A pneumatic gun?" he said.

"Also I need twenty ping pong balls and a hypodermic needle. " Buffy said.

"Seriously?" Xander didn't know if he could get everything.

"Seriously." Buffy said matter of factly. "Go!"

Xander went without looking back.

"You think you're going to stop Glory?" Dawn asked. She folded her arms and stared at Buffy in defiance.

"I'll deal with Glory in due time but she's not the real threat." Buffy said. "The real threat is Willow. She could kill us all with her magics."

Buffy removed a stake from the battle chest and grabbed her battle axe from the sofa.

"Don't think I've forgotten about Spike in the basement." She said as she brushed past Dawn.

Dawn stood there helpless . She didn't know what to do.


	8. Chapter 8

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Dawn watched Buffy walk towards the door leading to the basement. She knew Buffy had murder on her mind. This was not the first time Buffy had gone crazy and stuff.. She had attacked her friends before. Dawn frantically searched her mind for some way to save Spike. She liked him. He never talked to her like she was a kid. The solution came to her in a flash. Dawn grabbed a pair of scissors off the living room table and ran out the front door. When she reached the sidewalk, she yelled as loudly as she could.

"Hey, Buffy! I'm running with scissors!" Dawn waited for Buffy to notice that she was outside and then ran directly into oncoming traffic. Buffy dropped her weapons and launched herself after Dawn. Dawn kept running long after she reached the other side of the street. She hoped to lure Buffy away from the house long enough for Spike to escape. She didn't think this plan would have any problems. Buffy ran like a girl. Unfortunately, so did she.

Willow finally found the spell. She had returned to Buffy's room looked for the spell Buffy used to increase her intelligence. After searching through a few books she finally came upon a book that had certain paged folded and highlighted with a yellow marker.

"This is how you treat the ancient books of knowledge?" Willow muttered under her breath. Willow reviewed the details of the spell and was shocked. The spell drew upon the source of all secular knowledge. It made reference to a being of great intelligence that gained enough of an understanding of the universe to attempt to build his throne above heaven. The Jewish writers referred to him as the "Day Star" or the "Son of Dawn."

Others called him Lucifer.

"That's a disturbing coincidence." Willow thought. "The monks could have named her anything, why Dawn? This is not good." She thought. She tried to remember as much of her Jewish history as possible but she was Jewish by birth not by practice. She never even had a Bat Mitzvah! Willow gathered the books and headed to the nearest synod. She had to get a clarification of some of the terminology.

"Buffy is going to become smart, scary smart. I can't lose her to the darkness. If I lost someone that close to me I would just go crazy." Willow thought about losing the people closest to her, Tara, Xander, Buffy and her stomach clinched. She closed the door behind her lost in her own thoughts.

They returned after dark. Buffy had spent the last three hours chasing Dawn all over the neighborhood.

"Three hours wasted." Buffy thought. She desperately wished she could wrap Dawn in a stasis field. At least the girl wouldn't wiggle around so much. Buffy held a iron grip on Dawn's arm as they walked through the door of the Summer's home.

"You're cutting off my circulation!" Dawn yelped.

Buffy gave her a look that could have melted steel. As they entered the living room they saw Xander kneeling down next to a stack of boxes.

"I got everything Buffy. Funny thing, none of the stores asked me to show any I.D. I guess I look like a Buffy." Xander said.

Buffy released Dawn into the living room and locked the front door behind her. The door to the basement was wide open.

"Surprise, Spike is gone." She said with dry sarcasm. Buffy turned her attention to the boxes stacked in the living room. She looked the boxes over and was pleased. However, she was not so pleased at the way Xander looked at Dawn. Xander was a loyal friend but he was still male. She was not nearly ready to protect Dawns descendants yet.

"Upstairs, Dawn!" Buffy commanded. "Don't try running away again. I found you once I can do it again." Buffy turned to Xander. "Alright, let's start putting this stuff together."

The next day Glory found the Summer's home. Buffy saw her approach and readied the weapon. Glory raised her right hand to knock on the front door. That's when the door exploded. A ping pong ball filled with water and launched from a pneumatic gun punched a hole in the door a fraction of an inch from Glory's head. It was traveling at well over one hundred and fifty miles per hour. Buffy chambered the next round and fired again. Splinters of wood were jammed into Glory's skin but that didn't stop her. Glory grabbed the ball in mid-air shattering the bones in her hand. The third ball was on target. It hit in the fore head fracturing her skull. She fell backwards unconscious with a hairline fracture. As she fell she changed.

"Never come between a girl and her gun." Buffy said to herself smug in her victory. She reached the front door expecting to find the prone body of Glory. Instead, the intern Ben lay on the porch bleeding. Bone protruded from his palm.

"What the hell?" Buffy thought.


	9. Chapter 9

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The Buffy-Protector readied for war.

Things had not turned out the way she hoped. Over a hundred years ago she had arrived on the Ringworld, killed the reining protectors and secured a place for billions of Dawns descendants. The Machine and Night people were not a problem. The vampires were something else. Turns out there were humanoids that had evolved to drink blood but they were not supernatural in origin. They were just people. As long as they stayed away from the children of Dawn she would stay away from them.

She had been on the ringworld twenty years before she met her first real vampire. It was right after she had taken tree of life. Her intelligence, already high, became laser like in its focus. A routine surveillance scan of the ringworld had revealed vampire activity. She watched helplessly as a small pre-industrial village was decimated. Forty seven people were killed right before her eyes. She recognized the attackers' body language from her days in Sunnydale. The Buffy-Protector watched the bodies for three days hoping she was wrong. On the third day, the bodies began to move. The new born dead began the hunt for more victims. She franticly scanned the ringworld and found many other instances of vampire attacks. She did the math in her head. The numbers came out to well over one hundred million vampires on the ringworld and growing exponentially.

The thought of hunting them down one by one was insane. Their numbers were exploding. She needed to kill them all, everywhere and at once. She had the answer before she finished conceptualizing the question.

Three weeks later the Buffy-Protector moved the shadow squares and exposed the ringworld surface to constant sunlight. Shadow squares were the inner rings that provided night for ringworld. She waited until the dead stopped burning and then waited some more. The Buffy-Protector returned the shadow-squares to their rightful place and returned to her surveillance. She reviewed the distribution pattern of the vampire attacks and came to a conclusion that stopped her cold in her tracks. The vampire attacks all originated from the same place.

Thousands of years ago a moon size asteroid had collided with the ringworld. Where the asteroid hit, the ringworld floor had been pushed clean out of the atmosphere. From the ground level it looked like a giant fist was pushing itself up through the ringworld floor creating a mountain. They named the mountain "Fist-Of-God." The Buffy-Protector analysis showed that the vampires originated from there.

Apparently, the "Fist-of-God" Mountain was now a Hellmouth. She didn't know why.

That wasn't the worst part. The Puppeteers knew about her and were terrified. They were sending an assault fleet to kill her and take control of the ringworld.

The Buffy-Protector readied for war.

If a single demon got back to the Fleet of Worlds it would be all over for trillions of sentient beings. They had no defense against the things she fought against. The Buffy-Protector was the only thing between life in the galaxy and total darkness. She gathered her equipment and headed to the control room under the Map of Mars.

"Help me Willow." Buffy looked at Willow. Her eyes were moist. "I'm out of control. I may have killed someone." After using her pneumatic gun against Glory she was surprised to find Ben lying in a pool of his own blood on her front porch. She didn't call the police. She used the house phone to call Willow and Giles.

Willow showed up fifteen minutes later with some healing herbs and first aid. Giles was still dazzled by the blasted door.

"Isn't he the intern from the hospital?" Willow asked. She knew she'd seen his face before.

"I don't know how he got here." Buffy said. "One minute I was fighting Glory and when I went to check he was laying there."

Giles stared at the prone bloody body of Ben. "So are you saying, there is some connection between Ben and Glory?"

"I don't think so." Buffy said. "Wil, I've been so out of my mind. I must have imagined it was Glory." Buffy looked desperate. We've got to do something about that protection spell. We've got to turn it down at notch."

"The protection spell is not the problem. It's there for a purpose." Willow said as she worked her healing magic over Ben.

"We've got to get him to a hospital. Mojo is no match for a CAT-Scan." Giles said. Willow agreed. Buffy and Giles took Ben to Giles car.

"I'll take him in." Giles said. "I want you and Willow to talk this out." Giles placed his hand on Buffy's shoulder to comfort her. "We'll work this out." He said. Giles jumped in his car and drove away.

Buffy re-entered her house. Her front door looked like a _blasted_ heath. She and Willow sat on the sofa.

"I've made such a mess of things. I spent three hours chasing Dawn around; I almost killed Spike and Ben today. What can we do?"

"I think the real problem is the wormhole. It's exacerbated a manageable condition." Willow said. She tensed as she spoke the next statement. "I can't take the protection away. It's linked to Dawn. As long as Dawn exists the protection spell exists. The key is to get the protection spell to ignore the ringworld."

"The wormhole. " Buffy said. "We've got to get the protection spell to ignore the wormhole.

"Tabula Rasa!" they both yelled at the same time.

"Reengineer the tabula rasa spell to make the protection spell forget all about the ringworld and Dawns descendants." Buffy said.

"You want me to do a spell on a spell?" Willow asked.

"I'll help you reconfigure it." Buffy said as she thought for a moment. "You know, we still have a bigger problem."

"What?"

"The ringworld is unstable. If we don't save them, fifteen trillion people will die."


	10. Chapter 10

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

She felt the pull of the wormhole die. It felt like a fire had been released from her veins. Buffy was now cool, clear headed and sane. She slumped back against the sofa feeling the compulsion diminish to its normal levels.

"It's gone." Buffy said to Willow. "The wormhole is gone, like someone just flipped a switch."

Willow opened her laptop and began to scan the online database of Hubble images. It would be another thirty minutes before NASA updated. They waited in silence. When the updated jpegs were posted Willow smiled. The wormhole was gone.

"How did you know?" Willow asked.

"I just knew." Buffy said. "One second it was there, the next, gone."

Willow hugged Buffy.

"Looks like we dodged a bullet." Willow said. "Welcome back to the land of the sane."

Buffy grinned back at her.

"I was pretty far gone around the bend there. I really did want to leave Earth and fly to the Ringworld. I realize now, I can't leave the Hellmouth unguarded." Buffy said. Her eyes took on a faraway look. "We've got to save them Wil, they're still family."

"I don't know." said Willow.

"Image a snow storm." Buffy said suddenly animated. "There trillions of snowflakes in a storm big enough to cover a decent size city. Now imagine each snowflake is a person, a dead person. Image each snowflake is someone burned alive when the ringworld brushes its sun. Now imagine Colorado in the winter. We've got to save them Wil!"

Buffy's eyes were wide. Willow knew that Buffy still had the intelligence to imagine fifteen trillion deaths.

"I hate to break it to you Buffy I'm fresh out of spaceships."

"Maybe we don't have to go personally." Buffy said.

Willow looked puzzled.

"The Drake equation!" Buffy said. The Drake equation was created by the astronomer Frank Drake. It was a way to focus on the factors which determine how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in the galaxy. It is the number of stars in the galaxy times the fraction of stars that have planets around them times the number of planets per star capable of sustaining life times the fraction of the planets where life evolves times the fraction where intelligent life evolves times the fraction that communicate. There were at least two hundred billion stars in the galaxy. There could be millions of communicating civilizations out there.

Of course, a society of telepathic squids would be pretty useless.

"The Drake equation." Buffy said excited. "All we have to do is send a signal, a cry for help, and let the galactic red cross save the ringworld.'

"Or conquer it." Willow replied.

"Freedom is worthless if you're dead." Buffy concluded. "Besides, we have a big advantage. We're two hundred and fifty years in the past from the Ringworld's point of view. That means that more than one civilization may detect the signal."

Buffy leaned back and exhaled. Willow had known her long enough to know something was on her mind.

"What now?" She asked.

"We've got to send a strong enough signal in the direction of the galactic core. There's a hell of a lot of dust and background radiation. We need a signal that won't be degraded and can only be picked up by someone with the tech to save the ringworld. How in the heck are we going to build a dark matter generator?"

"Too bad the wiccans never learned how to modulate neutrinos." Willow muttered under her breath as she turned back to her laptop.

War was fun.

The Buffy-Protector worked the control panel under the Map of Mars that the Ringworld's ultimate weapon. Embedded in the Ringworld was a room temperature superconductive mesh. The mesh covered the billions of square miles of the ringworld flood just beneath the surface. As the ringworld spun, tremendous currents could be generated as the ringworld intercepted the magnetic lines of flux from its star. Carefully, the Buffy-Protector twisted the magnetic fields generated by the ringworld in order to incite a solar flare. A solar flare rose thousands of miles above the star then lased. Ten to the twenty five joules of energy became a coherent beam of x-rays as it sliced into the Puppeteer assault fleet. She missed three ships. Two of them jumped away into hyperspace and one, in a fit of panic crashed into the ringworld surface. From her observation tower she could see the escape pods landing safely on the ringworld. The Buffy-Protector closed down the flare controls as she grabbed her scythe and a field kit.

She went to hunt down the survivors.


	11. Chapter 11

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The Hellmouth-Protector stared into the darkness.

The Hellmouth, formally located on Earth, had found its way here to the Ringworld. It showed itself as a slow dark swirling vortex of evil. It was located inside the hollow mountain named Fist-of-God. Before, the bottom of the mountain had led into empty space. Now, a dimensional rift had replaced the bottom of the mountain with a gateway to a Hell dimension thousands of miles across.

The Hellmouth-Protector had arrived on the Ringworld simultaneously with the Buffy-Protector and the Hellmouth. It seems that there were things in the world that would always be connected.

The magic that kept the Hellmouth-Protector alive also gave him a metabolism and did not prevent him from partaking of the Tree-Of-Life fruit which transformed him into a Protector. With his greatly amplified intelligence it was a simple matter of neutralizing the chip in his head that had stolen his power and made him a plaything of the slayer.

Spike of old was back and he was a million times smarter and commanded the Hellmouth.

His hands worked over the control panels adjusting the energies that flowed over the gateway to the Hell dimension that was now at his to command. The last thing he wanted was to have the Ringworld over run with demons, that is, until he decided to let them loose.

He would have Armageddon on his time table.

The first field test had gone well. He had released a few dozen vampires into the Ringworld. In a few months their numbers had reached thousands. It took the slayer another year to even notice them. Her moving the shadow-squares and exposing the entire surface of the ringworld to daylight was pure genius.

Now he knew what he was dealing with. He had an idea of how far her mastery of the Ringworld had come. But there were secrets to the Ringworld that only he knew. The Buffy-Protector would die.

Spike would have himself a real good day.

Puppeteers only appear to be cowards.

They were territorial herbivores who lived in packs numbering thousands. Because of their caution they had managed to avoid the destructive wars found in other species. They had managed to build a technologically advanced society based on the overwhelming desire not to have the universe kill them.

As their numbers increased into the hundreds of Billions the Puppeteers cleaned out their solar system of asteroids and comets and then moved the other planets in their solar system inward to be used as food planets. The Puppeteers home worlds were five planets arranged in a perfect Klemperer rosette around their home star. The gravity of each planet was perfectly balanced by the others.

They were happy, content and safe until they met the Humans.

Spaceflight and other high risk activity were insanely dangerous. The monkeys from Earth enjoyed throwing themselves into danger.

They even walked by falling forward then catching themselves! From the Puppeteer point of view Humans were insane. They were the perfect species to subcontract the exploration of the galaxy.

Some years ago the Puppeteers had contracted the Human Beowulf Shaeffer to explore the center of the galaxy. What he found shattered the Puppeteers peace of mind.

The galaxy had exploded.

The density of stars at the core of the galaxy is upwards of hundreds of thousands of stars per parsec. All it took were a few stars going supernova at the same time to set off a massive chain reaction. Within a quarter of a million years, all life in the Galaxy will be extinguished.

When Beowulf Shaeffer returned from the core the Puppeteers were gone. They had taken their worlds with them.

The Puppeteers were headed to the Andromeda galaxy. On their way out of the galaxy a signal embedded in a coherent burst of dark matter had been detected.

Its message was simple: Save the Ringworld.

The Puppeteers followed the instructions embedded in the signal and found the ringworld. The ringworld floor stopped all subatomic particles cold. It would be the perfect place to ride out the explosion of the core.

There was one problem. The Ringworld scared the piss out of them.

Whoever build the Ringworld could still be around. The Puppeteers did what they've always done. They hired the Human Louis Wu to explore it. Along with the Human was a Kzin, a feline humanoid, and the woman Teela Brown who had been bred for luck by the Puppeteers.

The Ringworld ended up being saved by Louis Wu after he killed the protector Teela brown and turned a solar flare from the meteor defense system on a populated landscape killing trillions in order to feed the bussard fusion engines mounted on the Ringworld rim.

The events that occurred at the Ringworld were covered up and the current leader was removed from power. Puppeteers scientist had traced the signal leading them to the Ringworld back to the last place they would ever look. They traced it back to Earth.

Over two hundred years ago something had known about the Ringworld and had the intelligence and power to send a signal to the Puppeteers fleet. Now, whatever that thing was occupied the Ringworld control center under the one to one ratio Map of Mars and for reasons of its own moved the shadow rings and then moved them back.

The Puppeteers stepped up their efforts to kill it.


	12. Chapter 12

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

It was first discovered in September 2009 on Earth.

Quantum Entanglement had been a mystery for over sixty years in the field of particle physics. If a closed system of particles shared a net characteristic then that net characteristic was preserved no matter the distance or time between the particles. It was as if the particles were eternally connected through a higher special dimension. Changing the state of one particle, say collapsing a waveform, would instantaneously change the value of the other particle even if that particle was moving away at the speed of light.

Quantum computers were based on entanglement. They could in theory process an infinite amount of data in zero time.

In September of 2009 on Earth, scientist at the University of California observed Quantum Entanglement as a naked eye event. They observed the instantaneous change in state between two superconductors separated by space long after an initial microwave pulse had been sent only to one of the superconductors.

The Ringworld had enough superconductor mesh to cover six times ten to the fourteen power square miles or three million times the surface area of the Earth. It was the most powerful computer in the Galaxy. It could store and process the molecular movement of every Human on Earth in a fraction of a second.

In the hands of the Buffy-Protector it found other uses.

Dawn stood on the dais of the Great Machine. The Great Machine was a device build by the Buffy-Protector to pull herself and Dawn through both space and time. The Machine occupied over three thousand square miles and used over several million terawatts of energy. The only reason Dawn consented to being placed in such a machine was that she knew it would work.

She remembered it working when she and Buffy were originally extracted from Earth.

"This sucks!" Dawn muttered. She knew what the Buffy-Protector had to do.

Over the years the Buffy-Protector had traded with travelers from Earth. Centuries ago Humans had invented booster spice which extended human life span. Dawn looked thirty but she was well over two hundred years old.

What the Buffy-Protector was going to do was to use a tiny portion of Dawn's keyness to open up a window into the infinite dimensionality of space time. The Ringworld would serve as a quantum computer sorting the data looking for something that matched the Key frequency exactly.

The Ringworld was capable of processing the dimensional frequency readings from all of the dimensions in existence simultaneously.

Once located, The Buffy-Protector would _yank _on the quantum threads connecting the now-Dawn to the then-Dawn dropping them at an earlier point in space time.

"Let's do this." Dawn said.

"Already working." The Buffy-Protector replied.

Dawn looked down, and from her navel, a soft green glow began to fill the room. Dawn felt no pain. In fact, it tickled.

"Got it!" The Buffy-Protector said. "Earth, Sunnydale, May 20th 2003." She looked at Dawn wondering if she would remember the significance of that date.

"The day we closed the Hellmouth!" Dawn had remembered. They had both agreed not to extract the earlier Buffy until they knew the world would be safe. The new Slayers would take care of that.

The Buffy-Protector's finger hesitated over the start button for a fraction of a second. She knew this was it. After pushing that button there was no way back. Her arrival to the ringworld would close the temporal loop sealing her fate. Once on the ringworld the earlier Buffy would eventually build a wormhole generator that she would use to call herself to the Ringworld. Along the way she would find a way to contact the Puppeteers and have them save the Ringworld and not incidentally billions of Dawns descendants.

It's just that, she didn't want to be here! It wasn't fair! She was chosen to be a slayer at sixteen without her permission by the powers- that- be and now she was chosen to protect trillions of people she had never met because of the Monks. She hated it. She resented it.

She did her job.

The Buffy-Protector pressed the "start" button and opened the door to herself.

Directly above the Map-Of Mars a single stealth ship appeared. From its nose it fired a quantum singularity directly into the control room where Dawn and the Buffy-Protector worked. A fraction of a second later it tore into the workroom killing Dawn instantly. Moments later the singularity had torn free of the Ringworld and was heading out into deep space.

They were on the last bus out of Sunnydale. The First was toast, Anya was dead, Spike was dead again and the Hellmouth was closed.

Buffy walked up behind Willow and tapped her on the shoulder. As Willow turned, Buffy softly hugged her and said:

"It's time."

Willow had been dreading this moment. Two years ago Buffy had come under a terrible compulsion to go to the alien place known as the Ringworld. They had managed to hack into the SLAC national accelerator laboratory operated by Stanford and modulate the particle accelerator in such a way as to produce packets of dark matter with the embedded message: "Save the Ringworld." The message was complete with directions to find the Ringworld. Shortly afterwards, they modified the Tabula Rasa spell to make Buffy forget about the Ringworld until she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she could leave the Earth safely behind.

That moment was now. Buffy could feel her memories of the Ringworld returning. Buffy held the soft hug a few moments longer then stood and grasped Dawn's hand.

"Something's coming…" was all Buffy managed to say.

Willow watched as the view behind Buffy began to melt into what appeared to be a laboratory. The original background of the bus snapped back into existence and then something weird happened.

Both Buffy and Dawn split in two. The originals remained on the bus, the dim copies merged with the laboratory view. Things returned to normal. Willow was awed.

"That was it?" She said. "Looks like someone just made a copy of you."

"I hope they got what they needed." Buffy said wishfully.

She had no time for shock.

The Buffy-Protector ran to the tracking station and located the quantum black hole that had just wrecked her laboratory. The automatics sealed the lab against air loss as she brought the Ringworld QE generator online. QE was short for quantum entanglement.

Quantum black holes were notoriously unstable. Their event horizon, the place where escape velocity exceeded the speed of light, was so sharp they were able to cut the bonds that held virtual partials together as a result they grew hotter.

Quantum black holes were warm and if you fed them enough they exploded. It was called Hawking radiation.

The black hole was still embedded in the solar wind that blew outward from the Ringworld star. She hoped it would be enough. The Buffy-Protector aimed carefully. Every particle of matter near the singularity suddenly turned into a virtual particle pair.

Three minutes later the black hole exploded in a Gamma-ray burst returning mass, energy and information back to the universe. The information released back into the universe was so encrypted that it bared no relationship to the information it consumed.

It took the ringworld almost three hundred milliseconds to reconstruct Dawn.

The Buffy-Protector turned to Dawn who was sitting on the floor of the laboratory grinning from ear to ear. Smoke was rolling off of her body.

"That was fun!" She said.

The Ringworld had created a perfect quantum copy.

Hey, I don't make this stuff up:

.com/wiredscience/2009/09/quantum-entanglement/


	13. Chapter 13

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The Buffy-Copy wandered around the huge laboratory. She and Dawn had been pulled out of time by the Buffy-Protector who presumed to be her future self. The Buffy-Protector in the future had used a tiny portion of Dawns keyness to open a window into the totality of space-time and the Ringworld as a Quantum computer to sort through the infinite dimensionality of reality.

Like an artificial locator spell, the Ringworld found an exact point in the past that contained the dimensional vibrations of the green energy that lay within Dawn.

The Buffy-Protector had made a perfect quantum copy of both Buffy and Dawn as well as a copy of the magics they both contained.

The Buffy-Copy sat in a chair before a huge control panel. Her augmented intelligence could see a pattern in the lights. She pressed one of the buttons and the image of thousands of Dawns descendants filled one of the view screens. She felt the protector spell kick into a high scream.

"Alright." She said to Dawn. "Let's get settled in."

She held Buffy's hands in hers as she recited the spell.

"I found a way to remove the smartness spell. I can return you to your former self." Willow said to Buffy.

"Great, now I go back to being dumb." Buffy said sarcastically.

"Buffy, you were never dumb. Remember when Professor Walsh asked you to be a teaching assistant based on the quality of your work?"

"Yeah."

"Well, that proves that you've had a brain all along."

"Great. Now I feel I should be going over a rainbow or something."

"In any case, that spell was way too advanced for you. It called upon a source of secular intelligence known for it's pride which is not for the good." Willow said.

It had been a few days since they had closed the Hellmouth. They had all settled into a large resort hotel just outside of Sunnydale. They kept a low profile and avoided agents from Homeland security. The media was shaping the story as some sort of a terrorist attack on California. The media was right, but just not in the way they thought. The First was definitely a terrorist.

Willow began the last part of the spell. She handed Buffy her dog eared copy of "Elementary Calculus."

"Just start reading something." Willow said.

Buffy opened the book to t random page and started reading.

"Consider a real function (f) and a real number (a) in the domain of (f) When (x) has the value (a) then a,f(x) has a value f(a)." Buffy droned as she read.

Willow placed several crystals together and chanted.

Buffy looked at the page she was reading. The characters all seemed to blur together and the words on the page made to sense. Buffy closed the book in frustration.

"Can we go to the mall or something? Buffy asked.

"I'm finished." Willow said. "Looks like we've got the old Buffy back."

Great." She said. "Now, can we go get some Flowers for Algernon?"

"They're insane!" The Buffy-Protector thought.

It had been hours since a single ship had appeared above the Map-of-Mars firing a singularity weapon at her laboratory killing Dawn. The Buffy-Protector had managed to reassemble Dawn from the exploded remains of the singularity using the Ringworld as a quantum computer to perform the calculations in real-time. Oddly enough, the Ringworld never got to finish its calculations. When it had gotten sufficiently close to finishing its calculations the magic that created Dawn from the green energy asserted itself and made Dawn again.

"Dumb magic." The Buffy-Protector thought. If she hadn't erased the information in the data buffers the Ringworld would still be spitting out perfect copies of Dawn.

"How many times have I tried to explain to the Puppeteers that I'm not dangerous to them? I'm not a monster." She thought. The Buffy-Protector caught a glimpse of herself in one of the polished parts of her machines. She saw an shape with leather hard skin that could turn a knife, oversized elbows and knees for leverage.

"I'm not a monster." She thought to herself.


	14. Chapter 14

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Spike had his answer.

For the longest he wondered why he was pulled here. One moment he was in Los Angeles after the city had been rescued from a hell dimension then the next he was here on the Ringworld inside the Fist-Of-God Mountain in easy view of the newly formed Hellmouth.

The effects of the quantum entanglement generated by the Ringworld made sure that any closed set of particles had a zero net sum. Since the Buffy-Protector had pulled Buffy through time, the Ringworld compensated by pulling both Spike and the Hellmouth through time to cancel out the original arrival of the Buffy-Protector. The three of them constituted a closed system of particles. The state of any one of the three would affect the other two. Their destinies were entwined.

"But she failed." Spike thought as he examined the control board before him. His instruments had revealed that the Buffy-Protector had failed to pull all of Buffy through time but had instead pulled a copy of Buffy through time. Biologically both the original and copy were the same. The magic that made Buffy and the copy both a slayer was the same.

The only difference was how the Ringworld and the universe saw them.

The Buffy-Copy was not an original member of the particle set that brought Spike, The Hellmouth and the Buffy-Protector here in the first place. The equations had become unbalanced, had changed. The Buffy-Copy was a wildcard. Now all sorts of interesting possibilities loomed before him.

Spike placed any dreams of revenge in the back of his mind. After he had taken the tree-of-life fruit, the demon inside of him desired only one thing and that was protecting the children of darkness. Spike released a few hundred more hungry vampires from the Hellmouth into the Ringworld.

"That should keep her busy." He thought. "Let's see how long it takes her to move the shadow squares this time. " Spike watched them go.

His thoughts became dark and ambitious.

"One of these days I'm going to figure out how to turn off the sun without killing us all." Then it hit him. "The ultraviolet portion of the light spectrum is what kills us. All I have to do is broadcast ultraviolet light one hundred and eighty degrees out of phase with the incoming radiation to cancel out that part of the spectrum over an area three million times the surface area of the Earth in real time."

Spike began to run simulations. Calculating the individual vectors for the photons needed to cover the world was a task the Ringworld could easily perform.

Dawn was speaking with her husband.

"And it was like BOOM! The black hole came out of nowhere. I would to have loved to see Buffy's face!" Dawn said excitedly to the young man in the room. After being reconstructed from an exploded black hole Dawn went back to her quarters to freshen up.

The Map-Of-Mars had thousands of compartments. Dawn chose a small seven thousand square foot area to set up home. The compartment had a full living area, kitchen, bedrooms and nursery. Dawn was speaking to the young man in the room with her who was her current husband.

"There was a weird moment there, just before I entered the event horizon that I felt connected to everything in the Ringworld and beyond." And then Dawn said without missing a beat. "I haven't been home in days. Did you miss me?" Dawn walked over to her husband and then kissed him. She pushed him down on one of the overstuffed chairs and then straddled him placing her long legs on either side. She slowly started kissing the sides his neck.

"Oh Baby, I am so horny. You up for a round Acke?" She murmured.

He had grown use to Dawns kaleidoscopic display of emotion. That's how he could tell she was happy. Acke Andersson had been married to Dawn for over fifty years. He was happy, they both were very happy. Neither looked a day over thirty-five. Thanks to her obsessive sister Dawns family had some of the best health care in the galaxy.

After hours of lovemaking Dawn left the side of her sleeping husband to tip toe over to the nursery. She entered a warm dim room filled with hundreds of her sleeping children.

Dawn watched them sleep as a smile crept over her face.


	15. Chapter 15

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

The Ringworld was on fire.

The Buffy-Protector watched it burn from her observation center. Half a turn ago he Hellmouth-Protector attempted to filter out the killing rays of the sun by broadcasting an anti wave of ultraviolet light from the Ringworld. He believed this would make it safe for vampires to walk in the harsh light of day.

He was wrong.

Whether it was a bad implementation, bad mathematics or a poor understanding of quantum mechanics was irreverent. The Ringworld did not broadcast a stream of ultraviolet radiation as Spike wanted. It was broadcasting anti-matter.

The Buffy-Protector watched the Ringworld burn and was racked by fear for the lives of the children of Dawn. So far there were only three sections of the Ringworld that was burning. One was well over a million miles in the anti-spinward direction; one was so far away in the spin direction that its light took over five minutes to reach her.

The third was directly overhead. The sky above the Map-Of-Mars was well over fifteen thousand degrees.

"What did you do?" The Buffy-Protector screamed over a hastily rigged communication system. She knew that one day she would have to make contact with Spike. She never dreamed it was be under these conditions.

"I have ambitions you know. I don't want to spend the rest of eternity babysitting this new and improved Hellmouth. I want to get out and about. I want to stretch my legs a bit." He said.

"You're destroying your own food supply!"

"Really didn't see that coming. Any ideas on how to fix this?"

The Buffy-Protector cut the communications channel in rage. This was so typical of him. Spike makes a mess and everyone else had to clean it up.

The Buffy-Protector launched from her work station and scurried to one of the secondary laboratories. Dawn was inside of a crystal clear ship working with her husband to bring the babies aboard.

The aliens known as the Puppeteers were so paranoid that they would not travel in space unless it was inside of a indestructible ship. Dawn was storing her babies in a Puppeteer general products ship with a number four hull. It was a transparent sphere a thousand feet in diameter equipped with a stasis field that stopped time locally in case of an emergency. Her husband Acke noticed the Buffy-Protector. He nodded to her as she peered into she ship.

Of course "she" was a she as a matter of linguistics. Protectors were gender neutral. The Buffy-Protector would never have children.

Acke could never tell what was on the Buffy-Protector's mind. It could have been counting babies or calculating the number of footsteps from here to the third floor latrine. It's hard rigid face never betrayed any emotion. The Buffy-Protectors skin was too rigid for that. Suddenly, it just bounded away at full speed towards one of the upper level observation decks without so much as a goodbye.

"Well, that was weird and typical." Acke thought to himself as he placed little Xander in Dawn's arms. "Our lives are not like other people lives." He thought.

The Buffy-Protector had a bigger problem, one that nagged at her from the back of her mind. Namely, she shouldn't be here.

When she pulled the original Buffy through time, the operation went smoothly. She recalled convicting Dawn to leave frozen ova on Earth so that her descendants would be born and eventually make it to the Ringworld. She did not remember being a perfect quantum copy of Buffy. Whatever it was that she pulled through time was not her previous self.

The timeline had changed.

The Buffy-Protector had to be sure. In the upper observation deck was a quantum signature analyzer. Every object in the universe had a unique quantum signature. The Buffy-Protector had a series of quantum scans available made of her and Dawn when she first arrived on the ringworld. She was compare them to herself now. She reached the lab in record time and performed the comparison. There was no match between her current self and the scans that now originated with the Buffy-Copy.

The person she had pulled through time was not her previous self.

"Why am I still here? Changing the timeline should have negated by existence. What's keeping me anchored to this reality?" The Buffy-Protector thought.

She had an idea of what it was and it terrified her.

"_I am always falling at seven hundred and seventy miles per second. I am Ouroboros, the snake that eats itself. The sun is at my feet and on my face. I am eternal. I am the road between this world and the next. "_

The Buffy-Protector snapped out of her day dream. The voice she heard was not her own. It was the voice of the one that had summoned her through time and performed furious calculations at the quantum mechanical level to anchor her existence to this reality.

She had heard the voice of the Ringworld.

Outside, the air temperature spiked to over half a million degrees.


	16. Chapter 16

Ringworld is property of Larry Niven. All characters from the Buffyverse are Property of Joss Whedon. Everything else belongs to me.

Mars was melting.

The Map-Of-Mars on the Ringworld was a one to one ratio map of the planet Mars. Imagine two hundred and thirty million square miles of Ringworld floor raised high enough into the atmosphere to simulate the low air pressure found on Mars. Water condensed and ran off the edge of the map in multi-mile high waterfalls.

It was all black now. The surface area the size of a planet was slowly starting to liquidly under an intense heat. High energy protons and gamma radiation baked the surface.

"The Ringworld spoke to me." The Buffy-Protector thought.

She didn't know what to make of her experience. She knew that the brain ran on electric sparks between synapses. This meant that consciousness itself was quantum mechanical in nature. The Buffy-Protector didn't have time to think about it. The death of the world had her full attention.

Dawn walked up to her sister and put her arms around her.

"I know you're figure out something Buffy. You always do." Dawn's voice was low and sincere. She remembered the time they both were trapped in a hole in the ground at the graveyard fighting monsters sent to kill them by a Willow high on magic. Buffy had made her a promise.

"I want to show you the world." She had said to Dawn hundreds of years ago. And she did. Through Buffy Dawn had come to see and do more than anyone else she had known.

"I love you." Dawn said to her.

"I know." The Buffy-Protector said back. Her protector instincts were screaming at her now. At this moment Dawn and her descendants were the most precious objects in the universe to her. She would protect them by any means necessary.

The control room shook. Billions of tons of Ringworld material was shifting. The Map-Of-Mars was melting.

"So, what are you going to do?" Dawn asked of her.

The Buffy-Protector leaned over and whispered in her ear. Dawn's eyes went wide.

"Get everyone into the ark." The Buffy-Protector said suddenly all business. That's what they called the indestructible Puppeteer ship Dawn had transferred her children into. "Even if everything is destroyed you will be safe."

"Buffy…"

"Now!" The Buffy-Protector said. There was steel in her voice. By reflex, she had grabbed Dawn and without thinking, lifted her off the floor.

"I love you Dawn. I will always love you. Now get your family in the ark."

"But , you're family too." Dawn pleaded.

"Remember what I told you at the tower build by Glory's madmen after the Key had been activated?"

Dawn answered sadly. "You said be brave, be strong, live for me. That the hardest thing in this world is to live in it."

"That's still true."

The control room shook again.

Dawn and the Buffy-Protector walked over to the ark. The General Products ship was a sphere a thousand feet in radius. Dawn and her family looked very small and pitiful clustered near the center of the huge ship. Dawn and her husband watched the lonely figure of the Buffy-Protector walk away.

"Are you ready now? Are you ready to do what is necessary?"

The Buffy-Protector heard the voice of the Ringworld in her head. "Why won't you stop this?" She thought, thinking how could the Ringworld let things spiral so far out of control?

"I am large. I embrace infinity, hence I contradict myself. There was one bright shining moment when I was unity, a single consciousness that covered hundreds of millions of worlds. Parts of myself split off, and then split again. In me now are thrones and dominions, angels and demons and one who would assert his throne over mine."

"What will I do?" The Buffy-Protector asked.

"You will fight on the side of light." The Ringworld answered.

The Buffy-Protector took one last look at Dawn knowing that she would never see her again.

"Let's do this." She said.

The Buffy-Protector hit the switch activating the stasis field around the ark.

Where the ship stood was a blazing sphere of glowing silver. You could aim the entire mass-energy of the galaxy at the ship now and it wouldn't so much as make a dent. The ship was wrapped in a bubble of no-time.

The Ringworld shifted it's calculations. The matrix of particles known as the Buffy-Protector began to waiver as the information they contained found other passages through the fabric of space-time. At the quantum mechanical level there was no such thing as here or there. Everything was already connected to everything else and had been since the beginning of time.

An observer from the outside would have simply noticed the image of the Buffy-Protector flicker and then disappear.

She awoke falling down a corridor made of light.

"Where am I" she asked.

"Inside me." The Ringworld answered. "The energy pattern that constituted your mind is now being hosted by trillions of miles of superconductive mesh. We fall, always falling and flying at seven hundred and seventy miles per second around our star. "

The former Buffy-Protector saw ahead of her a glowing purple white spot.

"What is that?" she asked.

"One of Spike's fires. Do you see the root of it?"

She looked closer squinting at it. Purple white tendrils ran deep into the body of the Ringworld feeding the shape of the burning bush. She could see huge rivers of anti-matter pouring into it.

"A simple particle spin reversal should fix it!" Buffy realized.

"Then do it. " The Ringworld said. "You are connected to everything."

Buffy exerted her will and the fire went out. She felt like a god.

"The rest won't be so easy." The Ringworld said to her. "They are created and are guarded by beings best described as mindless agents of destruction."

"Yeah, back in Sunnydale we just called them demons."

"Will you fight them to save the world?" The Ringworld asked.

The Buffy-Protector smiled as her scythe suddenly appeared in her hands.

"That's what I do best." She said.

Later, much later, after the ark had been returned to normal time and Dawn had surveyed the burnt and smoking landscape of the Ringworld far out beyond the Map-Of-Mars, after she had made sure her husband and children were safe she remembered what The Buffy-Protector had said to her during their last time together. She remembered the Buffy-Protector describing what she planned to do. Dawn was quoted as saying:

"My sister became a god. But I was the one who found love."

END


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